The version of Preview included with OS X 10.3 could loop animated GIFs via an optional "play" button that could be added to the toolbar. With OS X 10.4, Preview lost playback functionality and animated GIFs would instead display as individual frames in a numbered sequence.[2][3]

As of OS X 10.9.2 Preview does not support ISO-standardized PDF (ISO 32000), and when saving, destroys aspects of PDF files without warning to the user.[4]

Preview can also encrypt PDF documents, and restrict their use; for example, it is possible to save an encrypted PDF so that a password is required to copy data from the document, or to print it. However, encrypted PDFs cannot be edited further, so the original author should always keep an unencrypted version.

Some features which are otherwise only available in professional PDF editing software are provided by Preview: It is possible to extract single pages out of multi-page documents (e.g. PDF files), sort pages, and drag & drop single or multiple pages between several opened multi-page documents, or into other applications, such as attaching to an opened email message.

PDF and TIFF documents can also be annotated and supplied with keywords, and are then automatically indexed using OS X's system-wide Spotlight search engine.

OCR PDF document creation —usually from scanned physical documents— in order to make their text searchable, is not available with Preview, though sometimes the scanner or all-in-one printer used to obtain the document image often has some manufacturer software to do this.

Preview can directly access image scanners supported by OS X and import images from the scanner. Preview can convert between image formats; it can export to BMP, JP2, JPEG, PDF, PICT, PNG, SGI, TGA, and TIFF. Using OS X's print engine (based on CUPS) it is also possible to "print into" a Postscript file, a PDF-X file or directly save the file in iPhoto, for example scanned photos.